VOCAL WILDS
The Art of Embodied Improvisation
OUR COLLECTIVE
Welcome to Vocal Wilds Collective — a sanctuary for the untamed, instinctual voice.
Vocal Wilds was founded by vocal artists and psychotherapists TatiAnah Thunberg and Irene Soléa Antonellis in 2025 as a hub for the vibrant, evolving collaborative community of vocal improvisers, song leaders, teachers, and facilitators devoted to the wild, relational intelligence of the human voice in southern Michigan.
Vocal Wilds nurtures a culture of creative freedom, communal care, and wild, embodied song. We uplift one another as independent artists and as a collective, each bringing our own lineage, style, skill, and vision to our singing communities. Rooted in years of personal and professional practice, we tend circles where music becomes a living field of connection, creativity, and communal belonging.
We cultivate spaces where song arises from deep listening, presence, and play— spaces where people feel safe enough to soften, brave enough to sound, and inspired enough to co-create. We collaborate with each other and with a dynamic constellation of artists, singers, musicians, dancers, ritualists, and creative facilitators who share a devotion to embodied voice and communal artistry. Each offering is co-created with the singers who join us, the artists who stand beside us, and the more-than-human world that inspires us.
Learn more about our Vocal Wilds collective below.
Irene Soléa Antonellis (she/her) is a music therapist, psychotherapist, life coach, vocalist, and recording artist with a lifelong career in the healing and expressive arts. She holds an M.A. in Counseling Psychology and Music Therapy from Lesley University and has led contemplative music concerts, workshops and retreats throughout the U.S. and in South America, Europe, and Asia. Nine years ago, she planted roots in Ann Arbor, MI, where she now lives with her husband and two daughters. Irene draws musical inspiration from sacred sounds around the world and Latin folk music traditions. With a musical inheritance that includes Peruvian folk and huayno (her grandfather was Peruvian composer Manuel León), Irene blends musical traditions, the old and the new, and is known for her directness, equanimity, warmth, and humor. Early in her career, she found a home in the vibrant a cappella communities of the Northeast, where she directed university and semi-professional vocal ensembles, toured with a cappella sextet 6Appeal, and quietly earned a few Best of Collegiate A Cappella (BOCA) nods while serving as adjunct faculty at Suffolk University. Her first solo LP, Beloved, was featured in Yoga Journal, Yoga Chicago, and on stages and studios from the Kripalu Center (MA) and Yoga Tree (CA) to the Prague Spirit Festival. Rooted in her bicultural heritage and a deep belief in the voice as medicine, Irene is devoted to embodied practices that connect us to beauty, wholeness, and aliveness. In her private practice, one of her specialties includes working with musicians and creatives to heal trauma, build and maintain deep emotional health and groundedness, experience expressive flow, and navigate the unique challenges of liberated, nontraditional career paths. Her approach blends talk therapy with somatic modalities including Music Therapy, Brainspotting, and Parts Work, offering a dynamic and deeply grounded path to healing and self-discovery.
TatiAnah Thunberg, LMSW (she/hers) is a somatic psychotherapist, couples therapist, vocalist, expressive and improvisational artist, and a seasoned experiential facilitator with more than thirty years of experience guiding transformative group practice. Her work centers the voice as a path to belonging—an embodied, relational practice rooted in presence, play, creativity, and communal care. TatiAnah brings a trauma-informed, neurodivergent-aware lens, an attuned facilitation style, and a joyfully improvisational spirit to every circle she leads—inviting participants to soften protective patterns, take creative risks, and experience the profound belonging that emerges when voices rise together. She grew up singing in choirs, where early experiences of harmony and shared focus sparked a lifelong devotion to collective song. Performance never called to her as deeply as singing together. In the 1990s, ceremonial community singing revealed her true home. There, she discovered song as communion, ceremony and devotion. Over the past fifteen years, through her creative and healing arts practices, TatiAnah has drawn together the wisdom of experiential education, community singing, vocal improv, chanting, ecstatic dance, authentic movement, contact improvisation, Hatha yoga, partner yoga, Thai yoga massage, and the science of nervous system regulation and somatic attachment. These lineages have shaped her understanding of the voice as a practice of relational intelligence. Collaboration sits at the heart of TatiAnah’s artistry. She has co-created a wide web of song kin through community building and nurturing long-term creative partnerships: Full Moon Kirtan Michigan: response chanter with Trevor Eller’s ensemble since 2011. Harmonic Voice Meditation: a vocal improvisation practice co-founded with Don Allen and Jeremy Fulwiler in 2013, flourishing for seven years. Supper & Sing Circle: a monthly community-based vocal improvisation jam co-founded with Mary Fithian in 2018, and still evolving. Song ceremonies, retreats, and workshops: co-led with artists Julie Kouyaté and Asia Sikkila since 2022. Lush Up & Fall Into Harmony: community singing and vocal improvisation retreats co-produced and co-led with Lyndsey Scott, Beth Patterson, Kath Weider, and Carol Bardenstein for three years. The Vocal Lab: a weekly vocal improvisation immersion program and biannual retreat co-created with Kath Weider in 2024, growing into The Songha—a dedicated, ever-evolving ensemble of vocal improvisation artists. Vocal Wilds: founded through collaborative roots that converged in 2025, when TatiAnah Thunberg, Dory Mead, and Irene Soléa Antonellis co-led a vocal improvisation retreat that birthed the name Vocal Wilds and sparked the formation of the Vocal Wilds Collective. TAZ: an improvisational duet in which Tatianah and multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer Michael Zielinski create spontaneous compositions through real-time looping of live instrumentation and voice, recorded unfiltered as extended jams and later distilled and mixed by Michael into shorter listening pieces in Ableton Live. TatiAnah has deepened her vocal arts practice through group and individual coaching with gifted voice and percussion teachers, including Dory Mead (Mead Performing Arts), Kath Weider (Studio for Vocal Alchemy), Aimée Debrone (Neuro Athletics), Dede Alder (frame drum, ceremony and vocals), and Kyler Wilkins (vocal looping). She is currently enrolled in Rhiannon’s year-long vocal improvisation intensive, All the Way In, under the direction of Cara Trezise and Sophia Ribeiro. She welcomes those drawn to singing as a relational practice to come lift their voices—held in community, shaped by deep listening, and rooted in our shared humanity.
Dory Mead (she/they) is a dynamic vocalist, improviser, and educator whose work bridges the worlds of classical training, theatrical expression, and spontaneous creation. With a BMA in Vocal Performance from the University of Michigan School of Music, she trained with luminaries George Shirley and Stephen Smith and went on to perform with companies including the Aspen Music Festival Opera Program, Metro City Lyric Opera, and the Austin Shakespeare Company. A featured artist opening for Jessye Norman and a performer at the Victor Café in South Philadelphia, Dory’s eclectic repertoire spans opera, jazz, musical theater, Shakespeare and experimental works. She is currently director and head voice teacher for her program of 15 years, Mead Performing Arts. Dory is equally at home on the concert stage and in the wild, unscripted world of vocal improvisation. She has studied with master improviser Rhiannon and is an alumna of the OperaWorks training program. A member of several improv ensembles—including A2CT’s long-form troupe Dearly Beloved and Pointless Brewery’s musical improv group Forte Factory—Dory thrives in collaborative, playful environments where sound and story emerge in real time. As a teacher and facilitator, Dory brings warmth, humor, and a respect for each voice. She leads vocal improvisation workshops through Mead Performing Arts and Ann Arbor Civic Theatre, and has been a guest presenter in vocal improv at the University of Michigan SMTD and Residential College. Her years teaching outdoor adventure and directing retreats have honed her skill in holding brave, creative spaces for people to grow, take risks, and be surprised by their own brilliance.
Julie Kouyate (she/her) is the founder of Kouyate Healing Arts in Ann Arbor, where she weaves touch, sound, drumming, breath, dance and song into her healing sessions, ceremonies, classes and retreats. Devoted teacher, facilitator, singer, song catcher, intuitive bodyworker, somatic experiencing practitioner, Bodymind and Sacred Living coach and dance teacher, she welcomes you to join us in exploring the power of the voice.
Kath Weider (she/her) is a singer, vocal coach, writer, filmmaker and devotee of the art of improvisation and the healing power of music. A long-time meditator and inquiry student of the Diamond Approach School, she is most delighted exploring the shared threads between music, movement, improvisation and spiritual practice - to pray through singing, to deepen one’s attention to the inner body through sound, to feel alive through the joy of spontaneous music making. She is also a certified facilitator of Effortless Mindfulness, a non-dual approach to meditation and awakening. Kath trained in conservatory-style vocal technique, before branching off to study experimental music and improvisation with David Darling, Warren Senders, Rhiannon, Barry Green, and Meredith Monk. She is a certified facilitator in the Music for People approach to improvisation and co-creator of the Vocal Lab, an Ann Arbor group centering around the art of vocal improvisation. Kath is also trained in Somatic Voicework™ The LoVetri Method Level 1 Certification and Yoga of the Voice method with Silvia Nakkach. In addition to founding the Studio for Vocal Alchemy where she teaches vocal arts & meditation, Kath is the lead singer for the Spirit Singing Band, and facilitator of various song circles, song ceremonies, workshops and retreats. Listen to her album of song prayers and chants, Prayer Beads and/or a sampling of her vocal improvisations on her site.
Beth Patterson (she/her/they) is a singer songwriter, improvisational vocalist, and clinical social worker in Kalamazoo. She has practiced improvisational circle singing in community since 2006 as a founding member of the Trybal Revival circle singing community in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Beth continues to host and facilitate community based improvisational singing in Kalamazoo which is focused on community building and spiritual practice. Beth released her second album “Love Says” in December of 2024. Beth anticipates the release of her third album, Singing Together, in 2025, which is a collection of community singing songs born out of improvs that focus on spiritual activism, connection and healing. Beth continues to record additional music including improvisations and explore a musical collaboration & creation with the use of improvisation. “Improvisational circle singing has been a foundational spiritual and community healing practice for me. I love connecting with people and helping them experience the joy of creation in the moment. It's magic.” She says: “I want to use this magic to help us to start imagining & creating change.”
We Believe
We believe the human voice carries ancient wisdom—of communion, of lineage, and of the wild intelligence woven through the natural world. The voice is instinctual. Emotional. Ancestral. It tells the truth the body remembers.
We believe singing is a birthright—an embodied, communal practice that reconnects us to ourselves and to each other. Not performance. Not product. But practice: presence, breath, curiosity, and courage.
We believe the wild, spontaneous voice is a teacher. It shows us where we’re open, where we’re guarded, where we’re longing, and where we’re ready to grow. It reconnects us to instinct, to imagination, and to the creative life-force that moves through all things.
We believe singing can connect us to wholeness. Raw. Imperfect. Alive. The voice is a bridge—between inner and outer worlds, between self and community, between the known and the mysterious.
We believe improvisation is a doorway into deeper listening. When we sound without scripts, rules, or expectations, something sacred stirs. A field opens. A place where creativity moves freely, where bodies soften, and where belonging becomes palpable.
We believe creative practice is medicine. Singing together regulates the nervous system. It awakens play and reveals what has been held too tightly, and invites it into motion.
We believe community is needed now more than ever. When we gather to breathe, to sound, to witness one another with tenderness and respect, we remember ourselves as part of something larger—living, interwoven, resilient.
